The Big Picture From Grid Edge Live 2015
GTM’s second-annual Grid Edge Live conference drew more than 500 attendees to Rancho Bernardo, Calif. to talk about a pressing issue facing the world’s utility and energy industries: how to manage the emergence of a distributed, low-carbon, customer-enabled energy future.
This challenge looks different, depending on which side of the meter you’re standing on. In terms of the grid edge, that’s the divide separating the 60-plus utilities in attendance at this year’s conference and the companies building the energy equipment and grid gear, writing the software and developing the algorithms, and creating the networks and business models for enabling this future.
Much of this new energy infrastructure is being built behind the meter, from the edges up, as we heard from representatives of companies with customer-centric energy offerings like SolarCity, Stem, Nest, Lowe’s and Time Warner Cable. But utilities are still responsible for making sure these edge-of-network systems fit into existing infrastructure and economic models — or finding ways to change them if they don’t.
